AUTO-IceNav: A Local Navigation Strategy for Autonomous Surface Ships in Broken Ice Fields

Fuente: arXiv
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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: de Schaetzen, Rodrigue, Botros, Alexander, Zhong, Ninghan, Murrant, Kevin, Gash, Robert, Smith, Stephen L.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author de Schaetzen, Rodrigue
Botros, Alexander
Zhong, Ninghan
Murrant, Kevin
Gash, Robert
Smith, Stephen L.
author_facet de Schaetzen, Rodrigue
Botros, Alexander
Zhong, Ninghan
Murrant, Kevin
Gash, Robert
Smith, Stephen L.
contents Ice conditions often require ships to reduce speed and deviate from their main course to avoid damage to the ship. In addition, broken ice fields are becoming the dominant ice conditions encountered in the Arctic, where the effects of collisions with ice are highly dependent on where contact occurs and on the particular features of the ice floes. In this paper, we present AUTO-IceNav, a framework for the autonomous navigation of ships operating in ice floe fields. Trajectories are computed in a receding-horizon manner, where we frequently replan given updated ice field data. During a planning step, we assume a nominal speed that is safe with respect to the current ice conditions, and compute a reference path. We formulate a novel cost function that minimizes the kinetic energy loss of the ship from ship-ice collisions and incorporate this cost as part of our lattice-based path planner. The solution computed by the lattice planning stage is then used as an initial guess in our proposed optimization-based improvement step, producing a locally optimal path. Extensive experiments were conducted both in simulation and in a physical testbed to validate our approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_17155
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AUTO-IceNav: A Local Navigation Strategy for Autonomous Surface Ships in Broken Ice Fields
de Schaetzen, Rodrigue
Botros, Alexander
Zhong, Ninghan
Murrant, Kevin
Gash, Robert
Smith, Stephen L.
Robotics
Ice conditions often require ships to reduce speed and deviate from their main course to avoid damage to the ship. In addition, broken ice fields are becoming the dominant ice conditions encountered in the Arctic, where the effects of collisions with ice are highly dependent on where contact occurs and on the particular features of the ice floes. In this paper, we present AUTO-IceNav, a framework for the autonomous navigation of ships operating in ice floe fields. Trajectories are computed in a receding-horizon manner, where we frequently replan given updated ice field data. During a planning step, we assume a nominal speed that is safe with respect to the current ice conditions, and compute a reference path. We formulate a novel cost function that minimizes the kinetic energy loss of the ship from ship-ice collisions and incorporate this cost as part of our lattice-based path planner. The solution computed by the lattice planning stage is then used as an initial guess in our proposed optimization-based improvement step, producing a locally optimal path. Extensive experiments were conducted both in simulation and in a physical testbed to validate our approach.
title AUTO-IceNav: A Local Navigation Strategy for Autonomous Surface Ships in Broken Ice Fields
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.17155